#orv novel chapter 377

[pttucker]

Okay, so, I've been thinking about some of my more recent posts and have started to combine them with some of my older posts and think I've come up with another theory that I want to throw out into the wild while we've still got like 40% of the novel left to go.

Well, actually it's not really a new theory for me per se, but I think I've finally cemented it whereas in the past I've had vague suspicions. Which has resulted in another giant post.

tl;dr: there are three stories in the novel, with the novel itself being Dokja's story and I think by the end Dokja will realize that he's inside ORV itself in a sort of Neverending Story kind of way, the Fourth Wall is between him and our world (and maybe also him and TWSA), and that the true Omniscient Reader's Viewpoint belongs to us.

So, anyway, I recently made a post about Han Sooyoung being the author of TWSA and overall I think this current arc we're going through right now is another major allegory / foreshadow for how the characters relate to TWSA, just like the Peace Land arc. But thinking on it some more, I think this arc (and possibly also Peace Land) is also showing how they relate to ORV itself.

Like, I actually even specifically said that certain passages relate to the overall plot of ORV such as this one—

Regrettably, there was no guarantee of the work ending up as a success even if the author did an excellent job. – Time to start our attack, Yoo Joonghyuk. Because the ones to complete the story were the 'Characters', not the author, that's why.

—and I think by taking that just a tiny step further, in combination with other clues, ORV itself will end up being almost a Neverending Story type of deal. Not necessarily with Dokja trying to talk to us like Sebastian and the Childlike Empress, but literally just realizing that he's a character in a novel.

Which is something Dokja has technically already realized, and maybe even unconsciously accepted, not only because of the above passage where he lowkey calls himself a character but also because he's seen that he's listed as a character when he messed around with the Fourth Wall (more on that later) and we have no idea if he recently became one or if he's always been a character and didn't realize it.

Unrestrained questions flooded my head. Why did I get this story here? What was the relationship between that story and being called a character? Was I now a character or was I still a reader? I… Was I still able to change the future?

However, I think the big reveal for Dokja is going to be not that he's a character but that the novel is not TWSA but instead ORV.

In fact, I know I've been using "TWSA" as kind of a shorthand for the world that Dokja is now in, with the scenarios and Joonghyuk and such, as compared to the "real world" he was in before as a company worker, but technically speaking TWSA is not Dokja's story. He is not inside TWSA. TWSA still exists as a completely separate text that he has access to and every time he looks at the revisions of TWSA they are still Joonghyuk's story. They go all the way up to the 1863rd round, and while Dokja is in the TWSA revisions, that's because Dokja is a part of Joonghyuk's story in the third round.

And speaking of the revisions, I kind of breezed past this in the tags of another post but Dokja got the Final Revision immediately after thinking to himself that he wants "an author" to tell him that he did good, that it's all going to work out in the end, that he's made the right choices. At the time I thought that perhaps Sooyoung could be the author of the revisions but now I don't think so anymore.

Going back through the text, the First Revision appeared when Dokja was dying in the Industrial Complex and he wanted to read TWSA to try to figure out if there was any sort of hope to fix things without having to ruin his story by killing innocent people. (And honestly he wasn't in any shape to kill people even if he wanted to at that point.) The Second Revision came after he abandoned Breaking the Sky Sword Saint to fight the outer god alone and felt like crap because of it (to be fair she shoved him through the portal while he was still trying to convince her to come) and he and Joonghyuk had a mini-conversation about what to do after and all Dokja could think of is to just keep struggling as best they can.

Basically what I'm trying to say is that all of the revisions have come when Dokja is at an extremely low point, floundering, trying to have someone tell him what to do, tell him that he's made the right choices, etc. Except not once has he actually said anything to anyone in the story around him. He didn't actually end up asking Sooyoung if he did the right thing; he wanted her to tell him it's going to be okay but he only thought it. Just like every other time the revisions have appeared. Almost like they came from someone else who can see what he's going through right then and knows he needs a little help...

Also, back when Sooyoung's version of the story first appeared, I was a little confused by the (First) after it, thinking that maybe Joonghyuk only had the first part of the story, but then later we see that Joonghyuk has 『Han Sooyoung – Records of the 1863rd turn (Last)』.

So now I don't think Sooyoung is writing the TWSA revisions, even if I do think she wrote the original TWSA, and I think that her story is also getting revised as she changes it because she is also a character in which "the ones to complete the story were the 'Characters', not the author" applies.

And speaking of the stories, I kind of went off on a sort of three, three, three tangent in the Sooyoung post, but I realize now that that can be taken even further. There's three unknown beings still left in ORV (Secretive Plotter, Oldest Dream, TWSA's Author), there's three protagonists in both TWSA and ORV, there's three people involved in a novel (Reader, Writer, Character), and there's three ways to the survive the apocalypse. Which, TWSA lists those ways as Regressor, Returnee, and Reincarnator.

But, technically, aren't we also seeing three ways to survive the apocalypse right now? Joonghyuk's way in TWSA, Han Sooyoung's way in her diary, and Dokja's way in ORV itself. Not to mention, now that I think about it, we have Regressor Joonghyuk, Returnee Dokja, and now Reincarnator Sooyoung...

Three separate stories, all sort of TWSA but not technically, more like they're all different versions of the same story. And the dokkaebi's have recently started talking about "which story will you choose" (talking to Bihyung btw, who's been helping Dokja all this time...) and everyone else in ORV keeps going on about a Single Story and how they're all vying for their true story and ending. And how maybe the true story/ending has finally come. Because this particular timeline is going through Dokja's story...which is ORV.

And too when I had the post about the "failed stories" I wondered if maybe it was foreshadowing for ORV ending in tragedy (and maybe that's still true) but also now that I think about the "failed stories" and how both Sooyoung's story and Joonghyuk's story could be considered the "failed stories" in a loose way. Granted, we don't currently know how those stories actually ended since ORV started off with Dokja waiting for the epilogue and the 1863rd ending was disrupted by Dokja, though Dokja has been pretty heavily implying that at least TWSA ended in tragedy up to the epilogue. And with the Single Story it's possible that all three of them will end up combined in the end of ORV itself.

Especially since we don't know what happened to 1864th Joonghyuk. It's possible we may see him again at the end of ORV. Also, I just realized that Joonghyuk stopped being a character when he moved past what was written in his personal story but, atm at least, he's also past ORV's story since we haven't seen him since and Dokja has no way of knowing what's going on with him.

On the topic of endings and epilogues, Dokja has been less and less willing to read TWSA as he starts living his own story and has finally outright said that he doesn't think his epilogue will be in the file. And, yeah, if Dokja's story is ORV then his epilogue would be ORV's epilogue. And ORV does have one. Even though I don't read the chapter titles ahead of time due to spoilers, I did notice when I looked to see how many total chapters ORV has that the last one had the word "epilogue" in the title.

And that's not even getting into Dokja casually stating that the novel is a lie. Which is very interesting.

And of course, there's the infamous moment where (while Dokja is sleeping I might add) the Fourth Wall starts telling the 1863rd Joonghyuk Dokya's story and it literally starts reciting the opening passages of ORV itself. And I'm pretty sure that when Sangah shoved him into it, he once again saw Dokja's story (ORV) just due to the fact that he zeroed in on not just Secretive Plotter, who doesn't appear in TWSA, but specifically all the things Secretive Plotter did in regards to and with Dokja.

In fact, as Dokja messes around with his Fourth Wall more and more, it becomes more and more sentient and present in Dokja's story (ORV) and he starts seeing things that perhaps he, as a character of ORV, was never meant to see, such as the fact that he's a character or that the Fourth Wall goes from simply blocking mental attacks to narrating Dokja's actions, reflecting his thoughts, etc. Just like ORV does for us readers.

I've actually briefly contemplated in the past that perhaps the Fourth Wall isn't necessarily protecting Dokja from the elements of TWSA, but in fact protecting him from the outside world (relevant part quoted below)—

Oh man, what if that's what it means by Fourth Wall? Instead of Dokja being a real person and the Fourth Wall existing because he knows he's not part of the novel, what if he's a character and the Fourth Wall is actually the barrier between him and the real world where the author lives? In which case, the being behind the Fourth Wall could be the author (or the reader!) of Dokja's story.

—and I then later began to wonder if it might be our world and not just some random third world inside the story of ORV, and I really do think that's the case now. Or it could be both! If I'm reading a comic about Batman who's reading a comic about Spider-Man, both I and Batman have a Fourth Wall between us and the fictional world we're reading about, ergo Batman has a Fourth Wall working both ways. (Ignore past Marvel/DC Comics team ups, pretty sure those aren't considered canon lol.)

And this is not only because of the fact that the Fourth Wall is acting more and more like a narrator (or like the third-person text of ORV) but that Dokja reacts so poorly to it going down. Sure, the first time the Fourth Wall went down a million constellations tried to attack him so that caused him issues, but later when he took down a little bit of it for the giants he was in a place with only his most trusted constellations who didn't seem to make any attempt to attack him and he only opened it up a teeny tiny amount and yet he still was physically wrecked. I don't think that he would be that affected by now by the elements of TWSA, especially since he literally learned he was a character and was freaked out for a moment but didn't have this big world-ending crisis...like he might if he attempted to connect to our world. Also, Dokja still hasn't gone back to the idea of using ORV on himself...

And on that topic, I know that I've kind of joked before that Dokja is the most oblivious person ever for someone who also happens to be able to read various characters' minds and see their actions, but honestly speaking there are tons of parts of ORV that are from other POVs that Dokja has never and likely will never see. I actually started tracking them about a hundred chapters back and we get a different POV, even if it's just a few paragraphs, almost every third or fourth chapter. And they're all from the third-person POV, just like how the Fourth Wall speaks.

Meaning that the true omniscient reader's viewpoint is ours.

PS: a very weak "clue" that I'm not really "officially" including is also the fact that The World After The Fall is mentioned as a book that Dokja has read and that's a real webnovel written by the same authors as ORV. I'm not really counting that since I do understand the concept of a cheeky little cameo but it could still be fun to at least acknowledge the possibility that it's something that secretly indicates that Dokja is maybe a little more connected with our world than any of the others.

PPS: I think if I find time this weekend I'm gonna go back through at tag everything or make a list of all my posts or something. Trying to find links for this majorly sucked and I just kind of gave up at points lmfao.

#I swear all I do lately is wander around in a daze thinking about ORV #I took a shower and zoned out so hard contemplating this theory I couldn't remember if I washed my hair or not #And then I got to work and realized I forgot to take my medication #ORV IS LITERALLY GOING TO KILL ME #lol I think I'm a bit tuckered out from all this theorizing all at once #well at least all this long form theorizing/meta analysis #time to go back to my regularly scheduled programming where I just react to dokja being a little shit and everyone else going along with it #orv #orv spoilers #orv liveblog #orv novel chapter 377 #omniscient reader's viewpoint #long post #kdj #yjh #hsy

[pttucker]

⸢I don't know whether you're a suitable guy for this 'three methods' or not, but at the least, I'm sure of this one thing.⸥ The following words were eerily similar to a certain body of text that I was familiar with. ⸢The you reading this story will definitely make it out of here alive.⸥ Han Sooyoung's afterwords came to an end there. For the longest time, I couldn't tear my eyes away from the full-stop at the end of the sentence.

Yeah, okay, at this point I feel like it's almost blatant that Sooyoung is the author of TWSA and the longer I think on things, the more I'm honestly ashamed that I never thought of this theory before now. I guess I was too focused on it being Dokja or Secretive Plotter...who might also be Dokja lmfao...and as a result just kind of ignored the very obvious possibility right in front of me.

Like, I recently started to think that Han Sooyoung is the author mainly because of the fact that we've still got three unknowns left and what looks to be three protagonists of ORV, i.e. Joonghyuk, Dokja, Sooyoung >>> Secretive Plotter, Oldest Dream, The Author. And, thinking on it, a general novel also has three people doesn't it? Writer, Reader, and the Character(s).

And also because Sooyoung's "Predictive Plagarism" is…interesting. She can plot out an entire novel whereas Anna Croft can only use her Future Sight three times a day in very specific ways? Hmmm. Not to mention this power carried her forward all the way to the 1863rd round and the only thing to mess up her plans at the very end was Dokja showing up. Dokja…who can create revisions of TWSA with his actions.

Even Sooyoung herself says that her predictions could be wrong, but even if you take it in the opposite direction and take them to be definite futures, we have this:

Now originally, the [Predictive Plagiarism] was the 1863rd-turn Han Sooyoung's power. The Han Sooyoung of this turn, the one responsible for writing this book, also had acquired that power now. And the result of that was this very book. Here was the brand-new signpost for me to follow, me who had read the 'Ways of Survival'.

I mean, it's possible that she straight up wrote TWSA (and/or the Revisions) with Predictive Plagarism and then forgot. Or that she's so good at predicting what will happen because she's literally the author so of course she knows how her own mind works.

And now she's literally directly mirroring TWSA and calling Dokja her sole reader despite literally immediately before that talking about both Dokja and Joonghyuk. So why is Dokja her sole reader? Why wouldn't she assume Joonghyuk might read it? Might also read it with Dokja? Not to mention Dokja just immediately devours it with a passion that he's only ever shown TWSA.

Also, I kind of glossed over it in one of my tags on a previous post, but Dokja got the Final Version immediately after wanting to ask Sooyoung if he's done a good job and if everything will turn out okay. Wanted to ask her as an author. And that's not the first time.

He's asked her before about TWSA, specifically why she would have written it if she wrote it. At the time, the way she responded to Dokja made me think he was the author but now, after seeing that Dokja can affect the course of the story both inside (revisions) and outside of it (comments to the author) plus everything shifting towards the idea of "the characters are going to make their own story" makes me think that was foreshadowing of an entirely different kind. And let's not even get started on this quote we just got:

The author of this scenario was Han Sooyoung. Regrettably, there was no guarantee of the work ending up as a success even if the author did an excellent job. – Time to start our attack, Yoo Joonghyuk. Because the ones to complete the story were the 'Characters', not the author, that's why.

Kind of sounds like the entire theme that we've been working towards for the whole plot, doesn't it?

And there's other clues, looking back.

Sooyoung always insisting she didn't plagiarize TWSA and Dokja even confirming that with Lie Detection. Sooyoung claiming that everything kind of pulls from each other & there's lots of common themes...and then we see that TWSA is full of other genres and very obviously referenced common tropes like isekai, reincarnation, mecha, battle tournaments, etc.

And then we have Asuka Ren writing Peace Land and then forgetting it and thinking it was something she read, which I have always thought was foreshadowing, though at the time I attributed that foreshadowing to Dokja. But more importantly, Asuka Ren getting discouraged because Peace Land wasn't doing well and breaking down and writing something else (Kyrgios) that was a bit more pandering to the general public. Almost makes you wonder if TWSA wasn't doing well and Sooyoung decided to write something else that took off...

And oh my goodness, I just went back to find the post to reference for the above and LOOK AT THIS WEBCOMIC PANEL! LOOK AT WHO'S LITERALLY IN FRAME WHEN ASUKA REN IS TALKING ABOUT "WRITER WHOSE WORK IS BEING READ BY A READER LIKE YOU." AHHHHHH.

That's actually so blatant I'm straight up ashamed of myself, especially when Dokja outright says he isn't the author, he's the reader. I actually remember thinking it was interesting that Sooyoung was there but figured "oh she's an author too." 🤦‍♂️

And there's other things too, some of which are admittedly more of a stretch than others.

Her attributes - not just the author attribute but also avatar. She can make and control multiple people. Kind of like an author writing a book, huh? Except then she's lost control of one of them because she put too much of herself in it (or vice versa). And now we have the novel where the characters are telling the story...

The huge emphasis on how gorgeous Joonghyuk is, not to mention various other characters' looks, which are compared to Joonghyuk's. Meanwhile, back in Peace Land again we have:

In the midst of running, Asuka Ren often looked back at the rocky area. Han Sooyoung glanced at Ren and asked, "Are you sorry?" "Huh? No." "Don't you feel that it is weird? It is probably the first time you saw a character that you made." "…Yes." "Furthermore, he is handsome."

Sooyoung not only focusing on how handsome Kyrgios is but tying that together with her statement about meeting a character who you created. Seems like that could potentially mirror someone else and their creation, hmm?

Also, on the topic of looks, I recently thought that maybe Dokja isn't from this dimension and that's why he looks blurred (because the Sooyoung of the other universe looked blurred too when speaking to "our" Sooyoung). But now I realize...there's no evidence at all that Sooyoung 1863rd doesn't also look blurred to the people of her world. And if we maybe consider that she's the original Sooyoung... What if both Dokja and Sooyoung are blurred to everyone but each other because they're both outside of this world as reader and author and the characters can't ever fully know what either looks like from inside the story?

Or, heck, I'm not certain we actually have proof that our Sooyoung isn't also blurred or that she sees Dokja as blurred? Like, sure, she calls him ugly but it's Sooyoung, plus that wasn't unprompted, Dokja was specifically asking about his looks and she kinda mocked/teased him. And there's even a scene in the Webtoon when he's dying of poison (the Nirvana arc) where she's like "he actually looks a little handsome" or something along those lines. Which I figured was worth mentioning because I remember thinking it was weird at the time but won't necessarily consider canon since it's the Webtoon and the novel is way more vague:

Like her, he was an ordinary person before the world was destroyed. Such a person had jumped onto a stage to decide the world's fate and was moving the main characters. Han Sooyoung had forgotten for a moment that Kim Dokja was also a normal human. She stretched out a finger and touched Kim Dokja's mouth. Then her face became a strange mixture of a smile and a frown. Han Sooyoung giggled. "…It is really strange."

...Actually that sounds vaguely foreshadow-y even without trying to decide if she can see his face or not.

And too we recently had the whole "which story will you vote for" thing going on where the dokkaebis are talking to each other. Now that we have at least two separate "versions" of TWSA going on I wonder if it's more along the lines of the author's version vs the reader's version?

idk I'll probably think of even more things if I continue reflecting on the novel, but this is long enough.

At this point idek what I'll do if Sooyoung isn't the author because it fits way better than my previous Dokja/Secretive Plotter theories and I was pretty certain at the time that it was definitely Dokja. 😂

#orv novel chapter 377 #omniscient reader's viewpoint #orv #orv liveblog #orv spoilers #hsy #kdj #long post #I swear if orv reveals she's the author like two chapters from now after I spent an hour typing up all of this theorizing... #which I swear has happened to me like two or three times before